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Wearables in the Enterprise

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Opportunities to deploy wearables in the enterprise abound. Smart glasses, smart watches, and other wearable devices can increase productivity in the field and on the manufacturing shop floor, among other settings.

Media hype about wearable technology might make you think wearables are set to usurp smartphones and tablets as the next consumer technology innovation. But unlike smartphones and tablets, which consumers largely introduced to the enterprise, we expect businesses to take the lead in building acceptance and creating demand for wearable devices.

Skeptical that businesses will propel adoption of wearables? That’s understandable, especially given that few enterprises have tapped the full potential of smartphones and tablets. With many opportunities left to explore using conventional mobile devices, business leaders may wonder why they should consider investing in this next wave of tech gadgets.

Wearables’ value comes from introducing technology into previously prohibitive environments—where safety, logistics, or even etiquette have hampered or constrained adoption of traditional technology solutions. For example, installation, service, or maintenance professionals working in the field could access technical documentation or procedures via smart glasses, rather than having to stop their work to look up information on a laptop or access a smartphone if they’re in a confined space.

Inspectors checking the safety of a fleet of tractor trailers could similarly use smart glasses to generate safety inspection data relevant to a specific vehicle’s load and weight distribution. Wearables allow individuals who work in harsh environments to access data without having to remove gloves, and to immediately record information via the audio or video recorder function on the wearable device.

Wearables also enable users to take real-world actions by providing relevant, contextual information precisely at the point of decision-making. In a warehouse, for example, smart glasses enhanced with augmented reality can guide workers who need to find, move, pick, pack, and ship products. On the manufacturing floor, workers could view metrics for nearby equipment on a smart watch, as opposed to having to get that information from a PC—thus allowing them to make faster decisions about equipment maintenance or output.

The potential uses for wearables are staggering. In Australia, firefighters are being outfitted with an ingestible data-transmitting pill that can detect early signs of heat stress. Health insurance companies may offer policy discounts for members who quantify their healthy lifestyles by wearing fitness-tracking devices, similar to auto insurance companies’ in-car efforts to track safe driving habits. And at least one airline is experimenting with giving smart glasses to staff at check-in counters so that staff can access customer data without having to stand in front of a computer.¹

With so many possible uses, we expect to see an escalating number of wearable devices, platforms, and applications in business operations. Now is the time to begin exploring wearables’ potential to improve workflows, drive down costs, and increase competitiveness. When working to determine how to deploy wearables in your organization:

Imagine “What if?” Consider how your business’s effectiveness could improve if workers had the information they needed, the moment they needed it. What current processes could be refined or even discarded? What could people accomplish if a photo or video could replace a paper report? What if a worker in the field could show a remote colleague real-time video from his or her point of view—while leaving their hands free? Think about critical processes (like emergency procedures) that are difficult for workers to master because they are either rarely needed, highly variable, or risky enough to require redundant inspection—and ways you could use wearables to provide instructions at the point of impact.

Kick the tires. As new wearable devices and software applications emerge, experiment with different hardware components and software platforms, and evaluate the organizations behind them. With hardware, you needn’t lock into a specific vendor, and doing so may in fact be disadvantageous. The hardware market is highly fragmented, but that gives companies the flexibility to switch vendors if a component they choose, whether a sensor or display, doesn’t measure up. On the software side, look for a platform vendor that will be technically and financially viable for the long term. Because the platform vendor handles the connections among different devices, you’ll want a flexible software platform that is capable of growing with the evolving ecosystem for wearables.

Become an early adopter. Connect with wearable manufacturers and software developers to share your business’s operational needs and explore the possibilities of working together to develop solutions. As companies look for beachheads in this new world, there are ample opportunities for teaming.

Simplify. Just as the design patterns for desktops, laptops, and the Web were not well-suited for smartphone and tablet use, a completely different user experience is required for wearables. User interaction should be kept to a minimum. If a use case requires an explicit user response, it should be limited to spoken commands, gestures, or a quick touch. Minuscule displays require designers to carefully consider what information should be portrayed and how to present it—for example, two-tone simplified graphics are typically more effective than detailed photos because detailed images are hard to see when they’re mostly transparent (as in a heads up display like smart glasses) or tiny (as on a watch or ring). Depending on the context in which the device will be used (if it’s used during surgery, for example), designers may also need to confirm users can apprehend information at a glance. To that end, the information displayed should be curated to precisely fit the immediate situation or task, with no extraneous data. Displaying one to three pieces of information is becoming a leading practice.

Anticipate data and device management. Data generated by wearable devices could exponentially increase the quantity of information your IT organization needs to store, manage, and analyze. The volume of unstructured data, including pictures and videos, could also escalate. Another consideration: How will you manage and repair these new devices?

Even though we believe businesses will ultimately drive adoption of wearables, it’s safe to assume that a significant portion of consumers will eventually wear smart devices of some kind and bring those devices to work, regardless of whether their employers’ existing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies support them. Some employees may not even think of their smart watch, T-shirt, or ingested smart pill as a “device,” leading them to inadvertently violate anti-BYOD policies. Consequently, IT organizations will likely need to broaden their BYOD policies to explicitly cover wearables and smart objects. Striving for simple rules that can govern ever more complex behaviors ought to allow IT organizations to stay ahead of new classes of smart devices and prevent them from having to revise their policies to manage them individually.

Engage the workforce. Look for a pool of early adopters likely to embrace and evangelize the technology. Ask line employees to participate in the imagination process: What persistent problems would they like to solve? What opportunities could wearables create? As you investigate potential uses, take care not to force wearables to accomplish tasks better suited to smartphones, desktop computers, automation, or basic human effort. Also ask employees what concerns they have about the devices, and develop plans to address them. Over time, social and workplace tolerance may increase, but during the early days, focus on employee education and limit your use cases to those that provide demonstrable benefits to employees.

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Wearables provide enterprises with an opportunity to rethink how work could get done with the aid of an ever present device that delivers desired information when needed. As long as employees perceive wearable devices as unobtrusive, safe, and helpful (as opposed to Orwellian), acceptance and adoption may proceed apace. Organizations that get a head start and begin experimenting with wearables could gain a distinct advantage over competitors that opt to wait and see.

Wearables in the Enterprise

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